Dynamic Multi-agent OpenADR Virtual Nodes for Distributed Demand Response Schemes

Demand Response (DR) has been described as one of the few solutions available for accessing the untapped energy potential of small/medium customers and especially of prosumers, towards supporting grid and DR reliability to a smart distribution grid. Investing on that notion, this manuscript employs virtual power plant (VPP) principles to deliver a novel, distributed, multi-agent virtual node scheme that aggregates consumers and prosumers and handles automatically OpenADR compliant DR requests. The introduced virtual node can act both as a virtual end node (VEN) receiving signals from a higher level (i.e., aggregator or utility) and/or as a virtual top node (VTN), dispatching optimal DR requests to customers. The proposed framework increases the DR results by not only optimally exploiting aggregated flexibility, but also through a dynamic bi-directional DR matchmaking process that can either recover monitored deviations within the virtual node (intra), or in-between nodes (inter) in real-time operation. The proposed design aims to elevate DR effectiveness, while enabling the participation of small to medium customers to energy markets.